On a sunny Tuesday afternoon, a regular procession of pickup trucks backs down the Swan Island boat ramp, past the raw sewage warning signs, to deposit small boats into the water. The ramp slants down into one corner of the Swan Island Basin, the body of water that separates Swan Island (really, a peninsula) from the mainland.
I’m here because the area is part of the Portland Harbor Superfund site. Everyone else is here to fish.
Most of the boaters have fishing gear with them, and a few people are fishing from narrow strips of sandy beach to the north and south of the ramp, as well. They are less than half a city block away from signs reading “Fish from these waters may be poisonous to eat,” and “Warning! Sewage Spill. Avoid water contact.” (Keep in mind, the sewage warning is seasonal, but the fish warning is year-round, and relates to the decades-long buildup of industrial toxins in the river, a totally different issue from the human waste problem.)
The whole place has a nasty, lingering stench that clashes strangely with the sparkling sun and the gently lapping water.
I’m intrigued by a small boat that’s floating near the beach — it looks like the aquatic version of a homeless person’s shopping cart. It’s fortified with plywood and covered with tarps. A small lopsided raft tied to its side is piled with junk: recycling bins, bottles, scrap wood.
Beyond that is a broken down dock and about the foulest-looking drainpipe you could ever hope to see.
The main sewage outlet, though, appears to be on the other side of the boat ramp, about three yards from where an old man is fishing. His grandchildren are playing nearby.
Heading north, I pass them and continue up the beach until I reach a toxic roadblock. Something opalescent and bright orange is oozing out of the sand here and draining into the water.
Out in the channel a ridiculously small tugboat is parked in the middle of a floating island of scrap wood. Its captain is aboard, poking around as if for something worth towing. His black lab watches him.
On my way back, Grandpa offers me a seat on his blue plastic bucket. I can see he’s fishing with worms, and using a sort of homemade looking getup. I ask him what he’s catching. He doesn’t speak English; gestures to his granddaughter, who is pouring water from the channel into a big black plastic tub. The tub turns out to have live fish in it, four big ones. They have small whiskers, so I take them to be catfish. I ask her to hold one up for me, so I can take a picture.
I ask her if she’s going to eat them. She laughs and shrugs, as if she’s embarrassed.
Nothing reminds you that you’re just a speck in the eye of Industry like getting stuck at a train crossing.
Freight trains cross Naito Parkway in the northern part of downtown Portland, near the river. Once you (eventually) cross those tracks, you’re in the Northwest Industrial district.
I’m headed for the Dockside Tavern, a crooked box of a building that looks like it was built out of driftwood, a long time ago. It used to face an industrialized stretch of the river; now it faces a long line of condos. I’ve always been intrigued by the place, but my goal today is to investigate it as the place in Portland where you can get a drink in closest proximity to the Portland Harbor Superfund site. I’d actually already had a few beers at the Dockside a few nights before, but I wanted to come back during the day so I could walk around and look at the river.
It’s Sunday and the new Riverscape Street, a sort of frontage road for the condo project, is lined with Mercedes-Benzes, which I assume belong to real estate agents.
On the other side of the condos, a wide esplanade has been constructed along the river. It runs about a quarter of a mile from the base of the Fremont Bridge north along the line of townhouse-style Riverscape Condos towards their crown jewel, the luxury Pacifica Tower. The whole development is partially built and partially occupied. At the north end, where the path peters out, someone has put in a little herb garden marked off with river rocks and raw construction boards.
The selling point here is simple: river view.
It’s a wide sweep of water, with a panorama of Industry on the other side: trains, smokestacks, crumbling docks and giant silos holding who-knows-what, far enough away to look kind of romantic. The water is green and blue, reflecting the sky. It doesn’t look toxic.
Oh, but it is. It’s contaminated with enough heavy metals, PCBs, dioxin and pesticides to qualify it for the Superfund list, designating it one of the most polluted spots in America. (There are about 1200 sites on the list.) The Superfund was envisioned as a way to clean up abandoned deposits of hazardous waste; the petroleum and chemical industries were taxed to create revenue for the program. Those taxes are no longer being collected, and the fund is no longer so super. That must be why my most recent water bill includes a $4.06 charge for the Portland Harbor Superfund.
Actually, it was that water bill that inspired me to seek out the Dockside. I envisioned it as the haunt of rugged Scandinavian longshoremen in watchcaps who would occasionally break out the grappling hooks if someone cheated at shuffleboard. Inside, it looks pretty much like any neighborhood bar, or rather, a little nicer, if a little more lost in time. The hanging lamps are the kind of stained glass things that used to be popular in the 1970s. There are beer signs and TVs and a menu that looks the way all menus used to look when I was a kid: multiple different kinds of burgers, clam chowder, fries, grilled cheese.
On the back of the menu is a history of the place, which has been a bar or restaurant since the 1920s. Before it was the Dockside, it was called What’s Up Doc. Before that it was called Dottie’s Sternwheeler. It became nationally notorious during the Tonya Harding scandal after incriminating evidence was found in the bar’s outside garbage receptacle.
It’s a nice enough place to have a beer, although it closes quite early. I went for happy hour with a friend one night, and then decided to return to the scene of the crime in the afternoon, when I could walk around with my dog and look at the water.
Just south of the bridge, I saw a man fishing. I wanted to know what kind of fish he was catching, and whether he would eat it. (State guidelines indicate that it’s OK to eat resident fish from this part of the river, occasionally, in small amounts, as long as you’re not pregnant, nursing, under the age of 6, or have a compromised immune system.)
When he saw my dog, he said, “That’s a nice dog.”
I said, “Thanks. Catch anything?”
“What kind of dog is that?” he asked. We talked about the dog some more. Then I said, again, “Catch anything?”
“Well, OK, then,” he said. “Have a nice day.”
I don’t like condos, but at least I have to admit that condo developers aren’t the ones who have spent the last 150 years dumping sewage and toxic chemicals into the Willamette River. And unlike industrial users, condo builders like to make nice esplanades along the waterfront so that people like me can poke around and take photos.
This could be your view from the balcony of a luxury condo in the Pacifica Tower. The water here is so contaminated by industrial pollution that it was declared a Superfund site in 2000, meaning it is on the EPA’s National Priorities List of contaminated sites.
LNG technology isn’t new, but it was new in 1944, when the only serious LNG-related disaster to strike the United States occurred.
It was a Friday afternoon, October 20, when one of the four storage tanks at the East Ohio Gas Company, on the east side of Cleveland, Ohio, began to leak. Facing increasing demand, companies had just begun condensing natural gas by cooling it, so that more could be stored in less space. The Cleveland plant was one of the first LNG storage facilities in America, and the tank hadn’t been built strongly enough.
At 2:30 p.m., the liquid began to seep from the tank. It returned to a partially gaseous state, appearing as a white fog. The winds from Lake Eerie blew the gas vapor into the surrounding neighborhood. Some of the vapor hung low in the air, travelling along gutters, sinking into storm drains and collecting underground in the sewer system.
Then, something ignited the gas. Manhole covers were blown sky-high. Jets of fire shot up from under the street.
There wasn’t a single explosion, but many. The leaking tank exploded in the initial blast, around 2:40 p.m., and a second tank at the facility blew up around 3 p.m. Fireballs from the exploding tanks could be seen for miles around.
People who had left their houses during the initial explosion returned home, only to be incinerated as a series of new explosions occurred, with ignited gas coming up through the drainpipes and engulfing homes in flames within seconds.
Images of the scene show fire and smoke shooting high into the sky, and afterwards, workers sifting through the rubble, looking for bodies. Piles of loose bricks filled the streets, and trees were reduced to burnt stumps. A square mile of the city was destroyed, including 70 homes, two factories, and the underground infrastructure.
About 130 people were killed, including 61 who remained unidentified at the time they were buried. Approximately 225 people were injured. Husbands and children returning home from school and work found their homes completely blown away, mom and all.
The Cleveland Memory website has an amazing archive of photos from the disaster here:
http://images.ulib.csuohio.edu/cdm4/results.php?CISOOP1=exact&CISOFIELD1=subjec&CISOROOT=all&CISOBOX1=East+Ohio+Gas+Co.+Explosion+And+Fire&CISOSTART=1,1
Could this happen today? Not exactly the way it did then, no. Storage tanks are much stronger, and all kinds of additional precautions are taken.
However, LNG itself is as dangerous now as it was then. If it does happen to escape, there’s no containing it and no way to predict how it will mix with surrounding air, wind, and worst of all, sparks. One commentator notes that the spill that caused this disaster was about five percent of the volume of gas held by a modern LNG tanker.
